I ran into this today, although it isn’t at all uncommon, and I thought I’d write about it because it does come up so often. An author on Facebook decided to whine that “nobody likes my books!”

Okay… what’s your marketing like? That’s where all of these things fall apart. If you’re not doing any marketing, then of course you’re going to fail.

That’s where it all started to go wrong.

Of course, he wasn’t doing a thing. According to him, he can’t “afford” it. Sorry, that’s an excuse and excuses don’t mean anything. If you care about sales, and that’s what he was complaining about, then you have to be willing, and able, to invest in your own potential success. That means, you have to be able to spend money to get your book out there in a form that people are going to be willing to buy.

He wasn’t.

Then, he had a ton of excuses for why nobody was buying his book. It couldn’t have been that nobody knew that it existed. No, people just hate him. That’s insanely common. Instead of looking at the situation objectively, they make it personal.

Sorry, it’s not about you. Nobody cares about you. Nobody should care about you. It’s about the book and its marketing, that’s all.

The problem with a lot of these people is that they just want to whine. They have no intention to actually make improvements, they just want to complain that it isn’t coming easy, in fact, they don’t want to do any work at all. That seems to be the biggest problem that we see from modern writers these days. They have poor expectations across the board.

In this particular instance, lots of people jumped in and tried to help him. They tried to explain what it was that he was doing wrong. Some of the advice, I agreed with, some I didn’t, but very few fell for the sympathy narrative. So what did he do instead?

He doubled down. He posted again that, thanks for all of the help, but he was sure that everyone just hated him and he was going to have to find a way to deal with it because he wasn’t willing to do anything to help his situation.

Sure pal, don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out then. This is the kind of thing that drives me so crazy when it comes to modern writers. They aren’t interested in doing the “job”. They are just looking to have fun and when fun doesn’t pay the bills, they pout and throw childish temper tantrums because… what else are they going to do?

If you want to write a book and put it up for sale, be prepared to do it the right way. If you’re not going to, don’t bother at all. If you want to write for yourself, have fun. Enjoy yourself. Understand that people aren’t going to pay you for it. There is a difference between writing for pleasure and writing for profit. Figure that difference out.

Otherwise, you just come off like a whining idiot, just like this guy did.